Introducing The Ultimate Interactive Map of Great British Grub

Introducing The Ultimate Interactive Map of Great British Grub

At Whichoffshore we pride ourselves on providing expats with lifestyle advice and financial information, and we’re regularly active on expat forums to find out first-hand what concerns our expat audience.

One topic that kept emerging on UK expat forums concerned sourcing British foods in your new home-nation. Conversations about Jaffa Cakes, Marmite and HP sauce abound, and more seasoned expats often share their pearls of wisdom with the expat newbies. This made us think:

“Wouldn’t it be great if we could collect this repository of expat knowledge and condense it into a single resource for UK expats to find their favourite British products and groceries?”

So we did.

The Ultimate Interactive Map of Great British Grub is the world’s largest collection of shops, bakers and butchers that supply British groceries and recipes. Just zoom in on the part of the world you’re interested in and you’ll see the nearest purveyor of British brands like Lea & Perrins, Walker’s, and (my favourite) Marmite.

Researching the shops was a painstaking process: while there are resources of this kind already available, they’re nowhere near as comprehensive as what we were hoping to achieve. Whilst our developers tooled about creating the map itself, our team embarked on the unglamorous task of filling spreadsheets with hundreds of entries sourced from expat forums, blogs and good old fashioned Google searches.

We made the conscious decision to try and promote independent shops rather than big chains for a couple of reasons:

1) An Iceland on the Costa del Sol may stock British goods but that’s no guarantee that an Iceland in Barcelona will.

2) If we did add every major chain the map would probably be unusably crammed with icons.

We wanted our icons to be just that – iconic. And what’s more iconically British than a Marmite jar? So we used the classic shape to demark shops and grocers, a pig for butchers and a classic pork pie for bakers.

A lot of work went into this map, and although we hope the results are worth it, I have to admit that we still need your help. The Ultimate Interactive Map of Great British Grub is far from complete, and there are huge swathes of the world we’re yet to cover. If you know of a shop that stocks pork pies, Marmite or any other British classics get in touch and we’ll gladly add it.